Solstice of Doubt

Summary: Twenty thousand years into the future, humans have abolished passion in order to survive. Aurisse sees the point and then again not. The distant memory of our Barbarian Age fills her with longing.

Solstice of Doubt

It was her annual review and it had come too early. That is, it had
arrived precisely on time, on the morning of the 21st of June like every year,
but it was too early for Aurisse because the device wasn't ready. She had
twenty-four hours before she would have to return the file to the heavily armed
and completely incorruptible delivery robot and without the device she had no
chance of keeping her secret to herself. Twenty-four hours would not suffice to
finish the fine-tuning.

After the robot had
left her with the questionnaire file, she plugged into her Neurorec facility
to clear her mind. A brief unconsciousness enveloped her while her neuronal
pathways were cleansed of recent debris. She emerged with her brain refreshed
but still no idea how to approach the problem. Somehow she had hoped she would
be ready in time and even when it became evident that she wouldn't, she had
clung to the thought that something, somehow, would turn up. This was,
obviously, very irrational, but she had been no stranger to irrationality this
past half year - an unexpected side-effect. But she could no longer afford
irrationality. In twenty-four hours, the robot would collect the file and
perform a neuronal check to ensure she had answered truthfully. She hadn't even
considered building a device that would override the robot's functions, since
there was no possibility to test it in advance. Instead, her device was
designed to override and replace her own neuronal signals in a way that was
undetectable to the robot. She knew she
had the principle right, but her latest tests had shown that there were still
minuscule leakages. She couldn't risk using it on the robot.

She picked up the file
and scanned the questions. No surprises, they were the same as the previous
year as far as she could see.

Are the leisure facilities in your cluster adequate? Which of them have
you used this year?

How often, on average, do you visit the cluster centre?

Is the medical provision in your cluster adequate?

How often, on average, have you changed your pod's location?

Have you suffered from any ill health this year? If so, list complaints
below.

Which contributions have you made this year to the development of your
cluster?

Would you say that you are fulfilling your potential?

Are your interpersonal relationships varied and satisfactory?

Do you have suggestions for the improvement of the production
facilities?

And in that vein it went on and on. Six hundred and fifty-seven
questions. Most of them were harmless enough and Aurisse had no difficulty
believing that they truly served the purpose of helping the government to
provide the best possible service to the people. But there were other
questions, questions like spring traps, and she recognised them now.

Have you had contact with any persons outside your cluster? If so, list
below.

Is your Fertiblok implant intact and working effectively? Is the
control reading consistently between 2.35ζ and 2.65ζ?

This year she knew what she hadn't known a year ago: that there was
more to this question than just the need to keep a tab on unlicensed
reproduction. To answer no to this question meant a brief visit from a medical
robot to adjust the faulty Fertiblok. There would be no accusation, no
assumption of tampering, only this, the guarantee that Fertiblok would be reinstalled effectively. To
answer yes when it wasn't true – had anyone ever tried it?

Aurisse considered her
options. She could invest the twenty-four hours into frantic work on the
device, but if – and this was almost certain – she would not be
ready at the end, she would face the robot without a plan. She could answer
yes, let them fix her Fertiblok and deactivate it again later, but what
if they also did a medical check on that occasion? She could try and reactivate
it herself, just for a day, so that she could truthfully say the reading was
within the prescribed range, rather than 0.00. This would probably work.
However, it would mean a sudden release of large amounts of hormones, and she
was sure this would be harmful if not fatal. Manipulating only the reading,
without having Fertiblok actually work, wasn't possible – she had tried
this first, months ago, before she had decided to go for the device.

She felt a need to
talk to someone face to face, so she checked mindnet to see where her friends'
pods were parked. Hanx stood in his favourite spot on the far side of the lake,
seven miles away. Gorian and Jaiyoo's pod was currently on the move, heading
northwards and away from her. Vaccu had not published her location, which meant
that she wanted to be left alone. Liri
and Barum were closest, only a mile and a half away on a meadow by the chestnut
woods, but Aurisse avoided them since they'd had the baby – she was worried
that Liri in particular might look at her and know.

So, nobody was really
available at short notice. Besides, she acknowledged with a sigh, there was no
point in talking to any of them right now, other than making herself feel
comfortable. None of her friends should be burdened with the knowledge of what
she had done, and to feel comfortable at this time was perilous. She needed to
keep herself on edge.

She glanced around the
pod for inspiration and saw nothing but the need to clean up. Dust lay on the ancestral unit. The hygiene
station was grimy and clutter from the workshop encroached on the leisure area.
She had been working too frantically on the device for the last month to give
any thought to housekeeping. There was no time for it now either. The pod
couldn't help. She needed fresh air to think.

Outside, she was
greeted by a fine, filmy rain. Her pod stood close to the lake shore among a
group of willows and haroon trees. Both species sported equally elegant, drooping
branches of elongated leaves, and the green of the willows was a pleasant
contrast to the rusty red of the haroons. The foliage was mirrored in the pod's
flexiglas shell. Since the day was overcast, Aurisse switched off the reflector
function to allow the pod to soak up the daylight. The glass became transparent
and she could see her abandoned device sitting on the workshop counter. She
shrugged and turned her back on the pod.

As she approached the
reed belt of the lake, ducks, coots and kennets fled into the open water. The
grass felt cool and soft underfoot, but a herd of wild sheep – descendants of
the domesticated animals of the Barbarian Ages - must have come through earlier
and left their droppings behind. Aurisse returned to the pod to put on shoes.
When she came back out, she heard laughter and splashing. The Garnuck's pod had
arrived some fifty yards down the lake shore and the whole family was
frolicking in the shallow waters. Kiri Garnuck saw her and raised her hand. Aurisse
waved back. She decided to walk up to the viewpoint, since she would have no
quiet in the vicinity of this happy bunch. A footpath led up the slope through
a thicket of rhododendrons. At this time of year, most of the shrubs had begun
to shed their wilting flowers and the path was carpeted with pink and purple
petals, some still crisp, others bruised and mushy. The seed
heads on the shrubs looked like alien bugs, multi-legged, ready to pounce, in
fact they reminded Aurisse of the poly-limbed creatures from Delta Pavonis with whom there had been radio contact in recent
centuries. They had sent pictures of themselves, at least that was how
humankind had interpreted the signals. Maybe they were something else, though,
diagrams for machines, religious symbols, elaborate insults, who knew. Without
language, communication was fairly futile, however sophisticated the radio
equipment, and with forty years turn-around time for messages, it was hard to
maintain enthusiasm in the conversation. The last message had arrived when Aurisse
was still a child; it had contained information about the star, its size, age
and luminosity, nothing that terrestrial science hadn't already found out.
Humankind could look forward to another similar disappointment within the next
few years.

She shrugged. There
were no aliens here and now, only withered rhododendrons. One species,
though, still stood in full bloom, a cream-coloured variety with burgundy
veins. This breed was one of her great-great-grandfather Turmon's and it gave Aurisse
a moment's warm glow to think that her ancestor should have created such a
particularly attractive flower. She would tell him later, back at the pod, how
well his shrubs had come on.

The path eventually
led to an open ledge that overlooked the lake. The rhododendron grove continued
to rise behind the semicircle of carved benches until it gave way to the grassy
summit of the hill. Aurisse checked the benches for a dry spot and sat down.
The rain had faded and a tentative sun peeked out between the clouds, bringing
out the frosted-green colour of the lake. On the far shore rose the ridge of
wildflower-clad hills that formed the border of her cluster. Solar collectors
lined the southern slopes.

Aurisse knew she had
to focus all her powers on finding a solution for her problem, but instead her
mind drifted off to the events that had led to the current dilemma. It was up
here at the viewpoint, not quite a year ago, that she had first met Pavan
Carulinom. He had come down from the hill and taken a seat beside her as if he knew
her, as if he wasn't a complete stranger, the first stranger she had ever seen.
She had shrunk back from his odd attire, his untidy hair and beard, and most
importantly from his unfamiliar smell, but he had smiled and started to talk in
that gently fluting voice of his so that she was no longer afraid.

But no, that was not
really the beginning. Long before she ever met Pavan face to face, she had
heard about him on mindnet, where rumours surrounded his name like a swarm of
midges. He had abandoned his pod so as not to be traceable. He was roaming the
planet at will, turning up at random clusters, making friends swiftly and
leaving as suddenly as he came. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the
Barbarian Ages way beyond what was available on mindnet, and he shared it
readily. Some even said he had no Fertiblok.

Aurisse wasn't sure
how much of this to believe. He wasn't
the first ever to leave his pod and his cluster. It did happen, every couple of
generations or so in a cluster, that someone lost their mind and rebelled.
Those poor souls were usually caught pretty soon trying to steal Nutrilic from
a farm or factory and they weren't seen again. Pavan Carulinom, however, didn't
get caught. He also managed to stay connected to mindnet, where his wanderings
were as unpredictable as those of his body. Aurisse had tried to contact him a
couple of times, but he had not replied. This disappointed her, but not because
of the man. As so often those days, her mind circled round thoughts of the
Barbarian Ages.

Twenty-three thousand years after the Collapse, humankind still hung on
to the records of those vanished times, but to most people it was a mere
history lesson that they learned, stored and never thought of again. Aurisse, though, found her imagination inflamed
by the echoes of this distant past. It both excited and repulsed her. The
insanity of it all, eleven billion people at the time of the Collapse, over a
thousand times as many as Earth's current human population. Nothing was as it
was now, simple, sensible, civilised. People lived crazy lives back then,
driven by greed and jealously, crowded together in those noisy, restless
cities. Everything was so complicated. There was no single government that
assessed and provided for the needs of the people, but hundreds of different
governments in different regions of the planet, some cooperating, some
competing, and none taking proper charge of things. People had to acquire the
necessities of life through an unregulated method of exchanging labour for
tokens and tokens for goods, with the exchange rate arbitrary and fluctuating.
This fickle system granted excess possessions to some and exposed others,
millions, to a premature death. There were shocking accounts of the third and
second pre-collapse millennia, blighted by wars, brutality and exploitation of
both people and nature. Thousands, tens of thousands might perish within days
through starvation or diseases or be wiped out by savage weapons. Then followed
the last millennium, when voluntary intoxication reached such soaring levels in
some regions that their economies floundered for lack of a sober workforce,
while other regions were overtaken by anarchy and destitution.

The Collapse was
inevitable. What puzzled Aurisse, though, what fascinated her, was that they
had held out for so long. They had, in a twisted way, been rather successful.
They had populated every corner of the Earth, climbed the highest mountains,
crossed the polar ice caps, driven through deserts, gone to places nobody ever
went these days. They had sent people to
the moon because they didn't have proper robots! They had, in their chaotic and
random striving, laid down the foundations for the science and technology of
the New Era.

Most intriguingly, though, they had been
incredibly creative. Mindnet stored what had been saved from the Collapse,
images, words and sounds, and while nothing that had survived could match
contemporary culture in subtlety and sophistication, Aurisse felt drawn to the
pictures and even more to the music with a persistent, nagging force. And she
kept wondering how they did it all. How they could achieve anything in such
short lifespans. The life expectancy, even at its highpoint, never exceeded a
hundred years. By this reckoning, Aurisse would have already used up nearly
half of her lifetime with nothing much to show for it yet than a few gadgets
she had developed. How then did the primitive humans in their limited time
build skyscrapers, write novels, launch space rockets?

Aurisse wasn't quite
sure for how long she had been plagued by this curiosity about the Barbarian
Ages, but it had begun in late childhood and intensified over the years.
Perhaps it was her inquisitive nature that had led to her being denied a
reproduction licence. They hadn't told her why, but since she was mentally and
physically healthy, the reason had to be a personality trait identified in her
genetic profile. In any case, the decision had come before she'd ever heard
about Pavan Carulinom, so she was pretty sure it had nothing to do with him.

Someone was coming down the hill now. She heard the footsteps on the
gritty path. It would be too much to hope for to see Pavan so unexpectedly, but
then he was always unexpected and she couldn't help hoping. The hope didn't
last long, though. When she turned her head, she saw that the approaching
figure was Lunima Barot, the cluster supervisor.

Lunima was a tall
woman in her mid-eighties, known for her fairness and her eidetic memory.
Though Aurisse couldn't fault her on anything, she didn't like her much. She
felt uncomfortable in the woman's presence.

“Good morning, Aurisse.
Taking a bit of air before the chore, or are you finished already?”

Lunima sat down beside
Aurisse, a little too close, but Aurisse didn't want to shift aside, it would
have looked odd.

“I've not started,”
she replied. “Got all day.”

“I always do mine
overnight. I can focus better in the dark. Six-hundred and fifty-seven
questions this year! I can remember when it was just about three hundred and
took only a couple of hours.”

“That must have been
before I was born.”

“It was, it was.”
Lunima leaned back, obviously settling for a bit of chit-chat. “So, how is the
environmental monitoring going?”

Lunima really didn't
have a clue about Aurisse's job of telemonitoring radiation levels in a number
of ancient nuclear waste disposal sites, but she seemed to think that asking
brisk and cheerful questions made up for a lack of understanding. Aurisse
shrugged.

“It's been fairly
quiet. Just the Karachay site is giving trouble, as usual. We may have to
extend the exclusion zone. There is a cluster about five hundred miles from it,
which had better be moved.”

“I hate them,” said
Lunima.

“Pardon?”

“I hate them, those
Barbarians who left us this mess. I'm not a woman of strong feelings, Aurisse,
but this, this makes me so angry. We will have to deal with this for as long as
the planet exists, and all because of a couple of generations fuelling their
wasteful and decadent lifestyle in this irresponsible manner.”

“I'm not sure if they
were aware -”

“Oh, they knew, they
knew very well. They were just short-sighted and selfish.”

So it was going to be
ranting rather than chit-chat. Aurisse didn't feel up to either. Her mind began
to drift while Lunima launched into a litany of all that was wrong with the
Barbarian Ages. Aurisse cast her thoughts back to her first encounter with
Pavan here on this very bench.

Perhaps she had already known that he was Pavan Carulinom when he sat
down beside her, because really, who else could he be? And perhaps she had
known then as well that her life had reached a critical point and that if she
listened to this stranger and harboured him in her pod and didn't report him to
the cluster supervisor as she should have – if she did all these things which
she could already feel she was going to do soon, she would not be able later
just to carry on as she always had. And true enough, within hours he planted
seeds of doubt in her mind that took root and flourished and gifted her with a
discontent she had not known before. The first, she remembered, had been about
going places. Pavan said it was a dreadful shame that people weren't going to
different places, that they weren't seeing the world.

“Why, though?” Aurisse
asked. “All clusters are located in pleasant and varied environments. Nobody
would have a need to go anywhere else.”

“You haven't seen the
sea.”

“And those whose
clusters are by the sea haven't seen the mountains, and the Southern clusters
don't see snow, but they get flowers we can't grow. It all evens out. You want
to see everything? That is selfish.”

“What about meeting
new people? Must be dull to be stuck with the same folk in your cluster.”

“I can meet anyone in
the world on mindnet.”

“Yes. On mindnet.”

The way he said it
suggested that he thought something was essentially lacking, not only in the
circumstances of her life, but in her attitude towards it. And she could see
how he was right, because having him sit beside her gave her a peculiar
sensation of novelty and thrill which no mindnet acquaintance had ever evoked
in her. The smell of him, which had made
her recoil at first not because it was unpleasant but because it was so
entirely new, now began to attract her. She wanted to have him stay. She hid him
in her pod and poured all her questions over him. They talked and talked, every
conversation bringing strange new ideas.

“Without Neurorec,
how do you manage?”

“The old-fashioned
way. I sleep.”

“Like the ancients?” Aurisse
couldn't help laughing. “What a waste of time!”

“Yes and no. It opens
up a whole new world of experiences. Not that dreams are always enjoyable, or
even often enjoyable. But they are intriguing.”

And so that night she
had watched while he slept, curled up in her comfy corner with a rolled-up
towel under his head and a coat pulled round his shoulders. She had marvelled
at this phenomenon, how he lay there right beside her and yet completely
removed from her presence. He had moved in his sleep and sighed and groaned,
all in response to an alien cosmos that lay hidden from her in his head. When
he awoke in the morning, suddenly restored to her world with the blink of an
eye, she questioned him further.

“How can you survive?
If you don't belong to a cluster, you don't get Nutrilic. Or do
you...steal? From the factories?”

“No. I eat what I
find. You'd be surprised how much is out there. Beechnuts, berries, mushrooms,
wild onions. And I've learned to set traps, so I get the occasional rabbit or
-”

“You kill animals and
eat them? Like the Barbarians?”

“Don't look so
shocked. Do you really believe all the protein in Nutrilic comes from
plant sources? There aren't many clusters who manage that. I'm sure yours has a
chicken farm tucked away somewhere or something like that.”

Aurisse didn't want to
believe that and so she didn't. She had not nourished her body with
liquidised dead birds. She moved on swiftly.

“What is it like to
eat? Is it not disgusting? I tried some blackberries once, when I was a child,
just out of curiosity. But they made me feel dreadfully sick.”

“Yes, that's another
endearing feature of Fertiblok. Just making sure that people don't get
into the habit of eating again. Because, you know, it is rather enjoyable, way
beyond the need for nutrition.”

“How so?”

“Oh, flavour, texture,
smell, the very sensation of getting your teeth into something. It's hard to
describe, you'd have to try it out for yourself. But of course you wouldn't
like it, courtesy of Fertiblok.”

“So it's true you don't have it?”

“Yes.”

“How come?”

“It's not something I talk about.”

So Aurisse cast about for something else to say.

“Do you ever go back to your pod?”

“My pod was repossessed by the government.”

“And all your records?”

“Deleted, I assume.”

“Even your parents? That was heartless of you, to abandon them like
that.”

“I'm not living my life for dead people. Anyway, if I had died, the
same would have happened. It will happen to your records as well if you don't
produce a child to inherit your pod.”

This Aurisse knew but too well and it was the -

“Aurisse? Are you listening?”

Lunima's voice cut through Aurisse's memories. Aurisse started and
turned her head to look at the supervisor.

“I'm sorry, Lunima, I'm a little distracted. I suppose it's the
questionnaire. Lots of stuff to fill in. What were you saying?”

“Oh, just how despicable it all was, using huge amounts of resources to
make people covet things they didn't need. Well, that's all in the past, thank
goodness. If only we didn't still feel the consequences! Anyway, I'd better let
you go and start on that questionnaire. I can see you won't have any peace
until you've done it.”

“I suppose not.” Aurisse rose, glad to escape from Lunima. “I'll go
back to my pod then. See you around.”

On the way down the hill, Aurisse considered Lunima's aversion to the
Barbarian Ages. It seemed somewhat odd. True, the Barbarian Ages were generally
seen in a bad light, but they lay in such a distant past that most people
didn't care to form any kind of opinion about them. Lunima, however, had spoken
of the sins of the Barbarians in a way that bordered on obsession. And she had
a point. People rarely thought about it, being so used to the system of
clusters and a tightly controlled population, but the Earth used to be a more
hospitable place that supported a much bigger population and the Barbarians had
rendered large regions of it uninhabitable.
It wasn't just the radioactive pollution. Deserts stretched across huge
expanses of land that hadn't been there before the Barbarians had plundered the
planet's resources for their short-lived luxuries, and all following
generations had to pay the price.

Still, the Barbarian Ages were not all bad. A time when people could
sing and paint like that couldn't have been all bad. If nobody else agreed with
her, Pavan did.

He had come back, about a month after he had left, and this time, to Aurisse's
delight, they talked about the Barbarian Ages. Her pod stood on a hillside back
then, overlooking the lake, and they discussed the relative merits of
contemporary and ancient landscape paintings they found on mindnet.

“See here, this is very pretty and very elegant, wonderful detail on
the flowers, but it is, how shall I put it, it's somehow tame and lame. The
ancient one, look, the way the light falls on the water, and it evokes all the
feelings that go with the scene, the time of day and the smells, the tiredness
after a long day outdoors, the first chill of evening moving in and the
afterglow of the sunshine on the skin, everything the real scene would have
contained, but then it also has this feeling of unease, a certain darkness even
though all the colours are bright, as if the painter has incorporated something
that wasn't really out there, something from inside...”

“I know what you mean,” said Pavan. “They had a genius we don't have.
And it wasn't even rare! Remember that we only see the pinnacle of their
achievements, and still there is so much of it. They reckon less than one
percent of all their music, Art and literature survived. And that is only the
quality stuff. There was more, quite a lot more, of shallow entertainment which
the government deleted.”

“Deleted?”

“Yes, so as not to congest the system, they said. One may speculate
about other reasons.”

“So most of what they created is gone?”

“Yes. And yet such wealth and variety! In a few short millennia they
created more and better works than we did in twenty thousand years. They had
something you don't possess anymore.”

“What?”

”Passion. The ability to soar with great feelings. The drive to rise
above the mediocre and create something truly outstanding.”

“Why don't we have it? We're still the same species.”

“Don't be so blooming naïve, Aurisse. Our species survived the
Collapse. But that came at a price. Fertiblok was invented by a group of
people who were wise in the context of their time. It doesn't just control your
fertility and your appetite. It shackles what caused the Collapse, the greed,
the aggression, but it can't do that without castrating other feelings as well.
All your emotions are dampened, Aurisse. All of the passion, the drive that is
naturally human, is tuned down by Fertiblok to a socially acceptable
level. So here we are, twenty-thousand-odd years on, tame and lame.”

“How do you know all this?”

“It's on mindnet, if you know where to look.”

“And you believe everything you find on mindnet?”

“I do if the evidence supports it.”

“What is the evidence?”

“You have Fertiblok, I don't. I have passion, you don't.”

Aurisse paused. She would have liked to claim that she had some sort of
passionate feelings, just to contradict his smug self-satisfaction, but she had
to admit that all her attachments, to her home, her work, her friends, her
cluster, were best described as tepid. She looked at Pavan and tried to fathom
what it was about him that gave him reason to call himself passionate, but all
she could discern was a certain intensity of his gaze. It seemed dangerous.

When Aurisse reached her pod, she saw that the Garnuck children were
now playing a game of chasing each other up and down the trees that grew along
the shore. There was no sign of the parents; presumably they had withdrawn into
their pod. Aurisse decided to move her own pod a little further up the hill so
as to give the family some privacy. With the gently swaying motion of the
walking pod soothing her, she leaned back in her seat and began to fill in the
questionnaire file. Perhaps once it was completed, she'd better be able to
think of a solution.

Are you Aurisse Espanse, aged 43? - Yes.

Have you resided during the year to date in cluster C245? - Yes.

What is your occupation? - Telemonitoring of radiation levels in
North-East sector B.

She worked her way swiftly through this first section of simple factual
questions. This was followed by a set of general evaluative questions, a kind
of attitude test the point of which she had never quite understood.

Do you think the world is ultimately good or bad? - Neither.

Would you describe your life as pleasant? - Yes.

Would anybody not? Even people with health problems could be made
comfortable enough. Life was pleasant and easy, with the robots doing most of
the physical work while people dedicated their time to enjoying and improving
their environments. Compared to this life of leisure, the non-stop efforts of
the Barbarian Ages seemed incredible, inhuman. Long working hours and the need
to sleep for a third of the day – how did people ever find time to do anything
worthwhile? Yes, life in the current era was pleasant enough. People were, Aurisse
thought with a crooked smile, well controlled and well contented. They had Nutrilic
and mindnet. Panem et circensis. Pavan had told her about that as well.

“The ancient Romans,” he said, with his hand resting on the nape of her
neck, a place where it fitted snugly as if it had been designed for no other
purpose, “had this policy to prevent revolts. They understood that people who
are well fed and suitably entertained are seldom inclined to rise up against
their superiors. Much of the Western world prior to the Collapse functioned on
this principle.”

Aurisse leaned her head against his shoulder and inhaled the unsettling
scent of his skin which, she believed, was a side effect of eating.

“Why don't we teach any of this stuff to our children?” she asked.

Pavan smiled to himself and looked aside.

“I guess we might,” he said eventually and Aurisse breathed a little
faster when she picked up the undertone of how he said “we.”

This was on his third visit, at a time she had already decided what she
wanted to do and had thought of a way to deactivate the Fertiblok
implant. That afternoon they made love for the first time in the late autumn
sunshine among the rusty golden bracken and she thought, Next time... And when next time came, she was ready. She had
switched off her Fertiblok. How she had managed to focus on that task
she was still not sure, what with all the disturbing thoughts swirling round
her mind. Pavan challenged everything, everything.

“Does it strike you as right that robots are allowed weapons while we
aren't?”

“They represent the government. In ancient times, they had police, now
we have robots. Someone's got to keep order, I suppose.”

“How do you know that there even is a government; that we're not just
controlled by the robots? Do you know any real person in government?”

“Ani Harbester went to work in government.”

“And have you ever seen her again?”

“I see her on mindnet. Her government work is classified, of course.”

“Of course.”

He would corner her like that, leave her hanging with the suggestion
that none of her ideas could stand up to scrutiny, and then move on to the next
point. While she still reeled at the thought that armed robots were actually in
charge of the planet, he launched the next attack on her world view by calling
the current era a dead end of history.

“What on earth do you mean? We are the most advanced civilization this
planet has ever seen.”

“Perhaps, but we are nowhere near as advanced as we could be.”

“In what way?”

“In almost every way. Think of Delta Pavonis for example. How much
effort have we really put into communication with them? They are an alien
civilization, and here we sit, contented to have a cryptic signal from them
every forty years.”

“Well, that's how long it takes.”

“Aurisse! We could send a message to them every day, and they could
send one back, we could send round the clock, and while the delay would still
be just as long, the volume of information would be so much greater! We could
probably understand their language by now. But see, none of our lethargic
astrodiplomats have thought of that.”

“And neither have any of theirs.”

“Perhaps they're in a similar rut, who knows.”

“Perhaps. But what's the point anyway? There's nothing to be gained
from that exchange. We can never get there, and neither can they get here. I
thought we were done with that naïve delusion of the ancients.”

“Oh, was it a naïve delusion? What if we are the deluded ones, sitting
around with our hands in our laps telling ourselves that nothing can be
achieved? Perhaps if we had been striving more, we would have found a way to
make space travel feasible. But we're lazy lumps who have contributed nothing
to humankind's advancement in twenty thousand years.”

“Oh, come now. We've made progress. What about Nutrilic, what aboutNeurorec? Just think how much time and resources people used to waste on
eating and sleeping. Think of how limited things were before mindnet and how
people thought they had to physically go everywhere. All the problems of mass
transportation. And ancestral storage, too, was a great leap forward. Back in
the Barbarian Ages, people just died and that was it.”

“Yes, yes, these were great inventions, but apart from ancestral
storage, they all date back to the first few centuries after the Collapse. What
have we done since? Aurisse, our civilisation has been stagnant for the last
twenty thousand years. We dawdle away our time with philosophy and brain
teasers and designs for pretty flowers. What do we achieve? Our technology may
be very sophisticated, but compared to what the Barbarians accomplished in a
few centuries, we haven't got very far. Our greatest triumph of the last
hundred years was the olfactory component of mindnet, a mere flippant whim. In
science, too – from first discovering the quark to formulating the Unified
Theory of Physics took a hundred and thirty-two years. And here are we,
pondering the problem of inverted photon stability for the last two millennia.
It took us twelve hundred years to solve the Harigon Paradox. We are slack, Aurisse,
where they were driven, striving – compared to them, we just potter about. They
had desires and ambitions which humankind still has, but which Fertiblok suppresses.”

“And you would unleash all that again? You know where it led.”

“It wouldn't have to lead there again. We have grown in wisdom. We
could continue to control reproduction, we have learned how to manage our
resources, and since we can provide a pleasant life for everyone with the help
of robots, I don't see why greed should take root again. But with passion, Aurisse,
with passion we could do so much more...”

Passion. She knew what he meant now. People talked about love and
thought they knew what it meant; she had thought she knew what it meant, but
what she had called love all her life was merely a pleasant feeling of
benevolence towards someone, and an enjoyment of heir company. Fertiblok saw
to it that hearts didn't soar too high. She could never have guessed or
imagined the way her love for Pavan had hit her once the effects of Fertiblok
wore off. It was like a sudden storm, it shook her and made her tremble. In
the early days, she could barely stand upright, she struggled to speak or look
at him. Even now it was a constant ache.

There was this one ancient song, one she had long liked so much for its
haunting tune that she'd got the translation, and then she had just found it
confusing. Why dream of gardens in the desert when there were enough places on
Earth that were lush and verdant? And
sweet intoxication – what could be sweet about it? She knew that the ancients
used to intoxicate themselves, because they didn't have the escapist
possibilities mindnet offered. But these intoxications were anything but sweet,
weren't they, they ruined people's health and social standing. These days,
however, she was beginning to understand. The desire, the desire for something
impossible, her body's yearning for – well, for what?

She craved food. Real food, not Nutrilic, which left her
dissatisfied these days. Instead of the neutral perception of the liquid going
down her throat, she sensed displeasure at the blandness on her tongue. And her
teeth were on edge with a desire to bite.

And there she was biting her finger. It was no use. It was well past
noon and she had not even filled in a quarter of the questionnaire. Pavan had
been wrong on that count at least. She would have achieved more with the focus
of her former dispassionate self. Had she not been distracted by constant
thoughts of Pavan – where he was, whether he was safe, when he would come back
– the device might have been ready. But it wasn't ready, it wouldn't be ready,
the robot would arrive and check her file and she wasn't willing to take any
risks. Which left only one option.

She couldn't leave the cluster with her pod. She knew this because she
had tried. A few years ago on a crisp, blustery spring day, she had brought her
pod right up to the summit of the hill and looked down into the broad valley
where the cluster's farming unit lay on the far side of a placid river. At
first she was too startled by such a treeless expanse to take in much, but then
she began to survey the scene. Clumps of boisterous clouds raced across the
deep blue sky, mirrored as fast moving shadows on the plain. Aurisse strained
her eyes to identify the shapes of the plants in this shifting pattern of
darker and lighter patches; plants she had never seen before but knew by name:
soya, squash, kale, legumes, various berries. Now they were in front of her, in
the leaf, so to speak, she couldn't tell which was which. An alien array of
vague green huddles spread out before her and she felt ashamed that she was so
clueless about the source of her food. She could see some of the robots moving
about in the fields, sunlight glinting off their metal bodies. The even
rectangles in which the crops were set out filled her with unease; the
landscape, she thought, should not be mathematical. Beyond the fields
she could make out the factory where Nutrilic was manufactured from the
crops. From there the pale blue bottleswere transported via a
subterranean tube to the distribution points in the cluster. Terraces of solar
collectors and wind turbines powered the whole unit. Aurisse knew all this from
school, but was surprised by the scale of it all, miles and miles. Just over
three thousand people lived in her cluster, did they really need all this
merely to sustain life? Or did their farming unit merge with the food
plantation of the neighbouring cluster, beyond that ridge of hills? This was,
after all, a densely populated area with no less than five clusters within a
radius of two hundred miles.

Aurisse opened a window and leaned out, but the view remained much the
same, so she moved the pod forwards, driven by an indistinct desire to descend
that slope and take a closer look. The pod had taken four or five steps,
wobbling slightly due to the steep bank, when the alarm sounded. A red light began to flash on the control
panel. CAUTION, read the display, YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR CLUSTER BOUNDARY. RESET
YOUR COURSE. Aurisse ignored the warning and maintained her direction. The pod
swayed. CAUTION. CAUTION. YOU HAVE ENTERED UNLICENSED TERRITORY. RESET YOUR
COURSE OR YOUR POD WILL BE DEACTIVATED. Aurisse continued forward. After two
further steps, the pod came to a halt. All assaults on the controls were in
vain. YOUR POD, declared the display, HAS BEEN DEACTIVATED. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR
CLUSTER SUPERVISOR.

“Blast!” Aurisse hit the control panel with her fist.

The river was too wide for her to cross without the pod. Nevertheless
she slid out and peered down the slope.
She could make out a faint hum that seemed to be created by the robots'
efforts in the valley. Beside her, the pod was eerily silent. All its lights
had gone off and she could see that one leg stood frozen in mid-air. She laid a
hand against the metal frame and felt the cool smoothness. It was in no way
reassuring.

That episode had cost her a lot of time and paperwork and extended
sessions with Lunima Barot, who hadn't bought her explanation of simple
curiosity. Nevertheless, it turned out to her advantage now, because otherwise
she might have attempted to take the pod with her and under the current
circumstances, this would have been worse by a factor of thousands. Without the
pod then. Aurisse clenched her fists to drown out the fear this prospect
caused. There was no time to be lost. In the morning, when the robot returned,
she had to be well out of reach.

It was four days before distribution day, so she had sixteen portions
of Nutrilic, which she dropped into the bottom of her bag. A change of
clothes, a raincoat, a comb and toothbrush, a portable mindnet receiver – she
glanced around, but there wasn't anything else that made sense taking. She
closed the bag and leaned it against the door.

The ancestral storage unit still needed dusting and wouldn't get dusted
now. She called up her mother.

How are things going, dear? It's review day today, isn't it?

Yes. I'll do my questionnaire later.

I always liked to get it out of the way as soon as possible.

Yes, you did. Mother, I need to tell you something. I am in a spot of
trouble and I will have to be away from the pod for a while.

On review day? Well, don't stay away too long, or you'll not have time
to do your file.

No, Mother, I mean for more than just the day.

I don't understand you, Aurisse. How can you be away from the pod for
more than a day? You need your Neurorec and -

I'll just have to manage without. In fact, I don't know when I'll be
back.

Aurisse, what nonsense is this? You look after your pod and your pod
looks after you.

I can't look after the pod any more. I have more urgent responsibilities.

What bigger responsibility is there than looking after your pod and your
ancestral unit? You are not abandoning us, Aurisse? You mustn't! The supervisor
will delete us! The pod will be recycled! You mustn't -

Aurisse flicked the switch and her mother's thought died in mid-sentence.
Pavan was right about this much, you cannot live your life for dead people.
Still, the tears were flowing now, flowing. She was tempted to switch the unit
on again, at least to say farewell to her father. But if she did, he would try
to persuade her otherwise. So she would have to leave without a word to him.
And all the others, including great-great-grandfather Turmon, he wouldn't hear
now how well his rhododendrons had turned out. What a heartless traitor she
was.

A twitch in her abdomen reminded her just in time of what was at stake.
Swiftly, she placed a message with Hanx asking him to keep an eye on her pod –
it wouldn't do for long, but at least for a while – and called in absent for
work. Then she grabbed the bag and opened the door.

She knew her chances of finding Pavan were small, but it was possible.
So many things seemed possible as the door of her pod closed behind her. She
stepped out onto the path.

Write a Review
Did you enjoy my story? Please let me know what you think by leaving a review! Thanks,
Annette Kupke

Chris Rolfe:
BOY!!! I sure love what Aer-Ki Jyr did with this series. IMHO he captured the essence of what stargate is all about. Thru out the Stargate stories Aer-Ki wrote Stevens and John Shepard some of the main characters in his stories are pursued by a corrupt I.O.A.. All the while Stevens is changing in...

Roger A. Fauble:
Excellent read, the only thing not to like is that I could only read it at home on my computer. I'm a character reader, I get into the characters, their story, who/what they are. In this story characters are introduced and developed allowing you to really get into them. Next the story is develop...

hypaalicious:
This story follows two main characters, Zoey and Derek, on a winding adventure that sucks you in from the beginning. It was easy to get into and get a feel for the world that the author is projecting, as well as all of the warring factions and difference of ideals that would otherwise be very co...

Nate_L:
I started to read this, excited about the story line. The writing style only made me more excited, I was stunned by Mikes ability to put this kind of story into words. It's Dashner-style, simple but sophisticated... (Makes sense to me, lol!)The beginning was a tad confusing, as I thought she was ...

William Klett:
Overall the story was excellentI felt a little jerked around with the MC's rapid mood swings. One second angry and ranting at a doctor, the next bragging to everyone about what she could do. I know, young teens and their moods swings, but this just grated more than flowed.The grammar and spelling...

Mark-Mikkel:
Got directed here by the author herself. Started reading it, schoolday turned into a day of reading. I really like the apocaliptic world she has created. There are some oddities in the writing tho, but I guess they are because she did have to do it for NaNo (which she wrecked, good job!). In the ...

cassandrab:
Delightful SciFi (for a change)! I am not a SciFi fan: mostly the genre is far too dystopic for me. This book (written by a high-school friend) is, on the other hand, generally upbeat. Yes, Earth's future is threatened. But Earth has a chance to plan a response. And (spoiler alert) ultimately win...

John Reed:
Seadrias masterfully captures the impressiveness and complex scope that a science fiction novel should provide while carefully crafting an entire universe that will leave a reader in awe from start to finish. The only flaw I could find is that I wish I could have read more. This book is certainly...

Angel S. Adames Corraliza:
Sensational! As a fan of superheroes, I have to say, you have a real winner of a story so far. I like that you made Allison a Wonder Woman expy, but kept her likable and relate-able in this first chapter. You showed us the Mother while also glancing at the Superhero, which I think is important to...

CookieMonster911:
The story overall was an adventure that is appealing to any age. The way the characters develop adds a more human characteristic to the novel. The writing style itself is amazing because you can learn every character's thoughts and emotions. The awkward love triangle and jerk moments adds to the ...